The Six Rules of Maybe (31 page)

“Scarlet!” Mom yelled up the stairs. In Jasmine’s house, no one yelled, there was a rule against it, but not at ours. Mom would call out from wherever she was—the backyard even—when she needed something. Dean Neuhaus would hate that.

I poked my head down the stairwell.

“Honey, I need you to get some stuff for dinner. Unless we want milk with a side of milk.” In spite of everything that had been going on, she looked good. Calm, maybe even happy. Marriage proposals were obviously uplifting. “I told Hayden to be ready in five minutes. I know you’re perfectly capable of doing this yourself, but he’s driving me crazy. Get him out of here for a while? I need some time away from the black cloud that we’re living in. One hour, to
breathe
. Me and Neil Diamond need some time together.”

“Mom …”

“Please, Scarlet. He needs to get out. I need him to get out. I worry about him being alone so much.”

I wanted to protest, to find a way to escape, but I heard the basement door close, his footsteps on the kitchen floor.

“Bus is leaving,” he called.

We didn’t talk in his truck. The windows were down and the radio was on, but there were no jokes and no laughter and no ease. Our pain and the ways my family had let him down sat right between us. He looked in the rearview mirror as he always did to check on Zeus. I couldn’t even speak about his absence. I couldn’t even speak
about my own part in everything that happened. There was an equation—the degree to which you hoped and wished for a good outcome multiplied by how wrong it all went equaled the amount of despair.

We walked across the parking lot of Johnny’s Market, with its jarring sounds of clanging carts and small children and into the store itself with its jarring bright lights and jarring music and jarring bodies reaching for containers of yogurt and plastic bags to put broccoli in. Every color felt too bright and every sound too loud. Bad things make the regular world too much to bear. It’s too simple then. Its simplicity shouts. A tube of toothpaste is so regular it makes your heart break. A cereal box does.

We were there in the international foods aisle, with its mundane assortment of the no longer exotic—refried beans, soy sauce, Thai food in a box. Hayden reached for a bag of rice and added it to the basket he carried in one hand.

“Onion,” he read off the list, and we continued down the aisle, and that’s when I saw him, the lean coyote body, the thin angular face capable of destroying our lives. Buddy Wilkes just walking past the aisle, fast, too, like he had places he needed to get to.

It hadn’t occurred to me that she was right here somewhere, still on Parrish Island. I’d have guessed they would have had the decency to at least go away for a while to some stupid motel, some loser house on the mainland rented by one of Buddy Wilkes’s loser friends. But I never imagined her here, her head on a pillow not five minutes away from Hayden’s agony, sleeping in some pull-out bed in Buddy Wilkes’s apartment over the Friedmans’ garage as Hayden lay awake under our own roof.

My heart stopped—I hoped Hayden hadn’t seen him. I would veer us away, steer us toward the frozen foods, something, just not where he was or maybe, God, her, too. Would she be that cruel to
appear in public like that? Could she be right here, picking out some pack of cinnamon gum? She had been cruel enough to leave; that was the thing.

Maybe Juliet had some stupid craving Buddy was now responsible for, or maybe he came to get more cigarettes, I didn’t know.
He’d better be fast
, I thought, and I grabbed Hayden’s sleeve to steer him left instead of right. I hadn’t looked at Hayden’s face, though, until that moment. He was looking down the way Buddy Wilkes had gone, eyes fixed. His face looked much older than I had ever seen. He lifted the basket and renewed his grip on it in a way that made the contents clatter against each other. He cleared his throat as if he were about to speak.

“Come on,” I said.

We just stood there at the front of the store, where the lines formed, where people read the fronts of the magazines and plucked containers of mints to add to their loot on the rolling black mat. A toddler tried to stand in a cart, and his mother shoved him down. Mrs. Sheen, the attendance lady at our school, said a brisk
Excuse me
to us to indicate we stood between her and the tortilla chip display that was the priority of her life right then.

“Hayden, come on,” I said again, as Mrs. Sheen’s arm reached pointedly around us.

“I think I saw … ,” he said. His voice was husky.

“Let’s get out of here.”

But Hayden didn’t listen. Instead, he set down our basket right there, right in the center of the aisle, and he strode toward the bakery department where Buddy Wilkes was headed.
God, oh God
, I thought. We were going to have a scene, a scene in Johnny’s Market, right near the croissants and freshly baked pies. I didn’t know what Hayden was capable of, and if I’d have imagined a situation like
this, I’d have guessed him to return to his truck and start it up and drive home. I wouldn’t have guessed his angry stride, his tense jaw. I thought of what he had said about his father—a bad man. I wondered about the places in him we didn’t know, in him or in anyone, that stayed undiscovered until what was most precious had been taken.

“Hey!” he called. His voice, which had been flat and emotionless for days, seemed full and roaring, like that fire in the Saint George garage. “Hey!”

I followed. He was walking fast enough that up ahead I could see the back of Buddy Wilkes, who looked so suddenly less of everything that Hayden was. Less strong, less intelligent with his pale face and stupid grin, less attractive, less of a man in all ways. Buddy Wilkes turned to the sound of Hayden’s voice. He held a box of doughnuts in his hand, just doughnuts. The kind that came in a row, all dressed up in powdered sugar.

“Where is she?” Hayden said. “That’s all I want to know.”

“Who the fuck are you?” Buddy Wilkes said. He looked honestly surprised. Maybe even a little scared.

“Her
husband
.”

“Her husband?” He squinted. “Look, man, I don’t know who—”

“Don’t play games with—”

Hayden stepped toward him. We were right there in the bakery department, where you could get your name put on a birthday cake underneath frosting balloons.

“Juliet
Ellis’s
husband?” Buddy’s face cleared in understanding. The threat that made his body tense was gone, and he held his free hand out as a stop sign instead. “Look,” he said. “Keep that chick away from me, understand? I don’t want anything to do with your problems.”

“What?” Hayden said. He looked a little unsteady. The fight
drained out of him too. It looked possible for him to fall right into that table of cookies in plastic containers.

“Tell her to stop calling me, okay? It’s not my problem.”

I didn’t understand, and then I did. I understood when Elizabeth Everly appeared with a container of milk. She looked at all of us with uncertainty, leaned into Buddy, and whispered something to him. He put his arm around her, guided her away from where we stood.

I took Hayden’s elbow. I knew, as he did, that this was worse somehow, worse than if Juliet had been in that garage apartment with Buddy Wilkes. Buddy Wilkes would have been a simple reason for leaving. Hayden could have brought her back, maybe. He could have forgiven some stupid misguided act with some rival who was in no way his equal. But that she had wanted to break her vows and didn’t and had left anyway—it meant that her reasons were rivers of need too deep and treacherous to cross. You couldn’t see those rivers and still have hope.

That night, Mom and I were alone for dinner. We had been alone for dinner a lot before Juliet had come home. I had been used to the feeling, Mom and me like an old married couple, the two of us talking about our day and asking the other to pass the butter. But now there was the sort of vast space and stretching time between us that made the clank of the silverware the chosen sound of loneliness. The space was as ragged and confused as the hole in the Saint Georges’ garage, covered in plastic, as ragged and confused as the empty places created in the absence of those you loved, people who had left you that you cared about—Zeus and Hayden, Juliet and Jitter, Fiona Saint George and Kevin Frink, driving and driving and driving God knows where in that Volkswagen. Each time my knife scraped my plate or the tip of
Mom’s fork hit hers, I felt like it was possible to go on and on forever feeling alone.

I felt too many things, and they were crashing against each other until I could not tell which feeling was which. Aching loneliness, despair, worry, but something else pushing to be heard too—something maybe even more honest than the rest.

“People shouldn’t just go abandoning other people,” I said.

“That’s true,” Mom said.

“What about the baby?” I said. “Is she just going to stay away and we’ll never see it?”

“I don’t think that will happen,” she said.

“Maybe we should take care of it. She should have the baby and you and me and Hayden will take care of it.”

Mom stopped moving her food around with the tines of her fork. “I think Juliet’s going to be an excellent mother.”

I could have spit my milk. The feelings were shuffling and rearranging themselves into some order. “Look what she’s doing now.”

“She’s scared now. You can be scared and still be a good mother when the time comes.”

Truth was funny, because it was an insistent thing, maybe as powerful and insistent as some force of nature, the push of water or wind. You could keep it out only so long, but it had its own will and its own needs, and maybe you could keep it at bay with lies, but not for long, not for always.

Too many things had happened in the last few days, and those things shoved me hard then so that everything I had held up for so long tipped easily, just like that. You don’t realize all that’s been eroded sometimes, all the damage that’s been done, until the moment when the water rushes through and everything is finally and thoroughly destroyed.

“This is so old,” I said. And it was, it felt a million years old, her watching so carefully over this strong person, my sister. Her giving and giving and giving to Juliet, who took and took and took. The words were out and the anger, too—the truth of how angry I felt was right there for her to see. It filled me up, beyond what my body could hold. It could have picked me up, overcome me, like a big swell of the sea, taken me far, far out from what I knew. That’s how big it seemed.

“Here you go, defending her again. No matter what she does, you’re there to show your endless support.” I sounded like a small and jealous child. I felt like one.

Her face turned red. I’m sure she was wishing she were anywhere else, now. Whenever there was a talk radio show that got too heated, even, she’d snap it off. “I would do the same for you. You know that.”

My face was red too. I could feel its heat rise up my neck and flame in my cheeks. “Maybe I don’t know that,” I said. “Juliet uses up both our rations of love and understanding. That seems pretty clear.”

Mom threw her napkin down as if she’d had enough. “Scarlet, that’s ridiculous.” She shook her head back and forth. “Do you think I need this at this moment? This whole little sudden outburst?”

It didn’t feel sudden; it felt years and years old too, an outburst that had grown layers like the crust of the earth, now forced to move. It was so old that I knew all the lines from hearing them so long in my head. The words came swiftly and easily. “What would happen if I were Juliet right now? You’d argue and you’d spend hours together crying and talking alone on her bed. While I sat and did my
homework
or something. Juliet has always gotten everything. From you and from everyone else.”

“That’s unfair, Scarlet. You never seemed to need the same things Juliet did. You didn’t want them. You were always …” She searched around for a word. Her face looked lost.

“Forgettable?” I said.

I might have thrown a dagger, that’s how wounded she looked, a surprise attack with an arrow from an assailant hidden behind a tree. Her eyes filled with tears. “Why would you think this about yourself? Or me? Why?”

I remembered shut doors, laughter, voices, raised or quiet, on the other side. “Like anything else. You just come to conclusions. You just see things and you come to conclusions and then it’s fact in your mind.”

“I think you’ve come to some very wrong conclusions. About yourself and me and even Juliet.”

“It’s always the two of you.”

“Oh honey,” she said. She reached out to me, took me in her arms even though I didn’t want her arms. “Oh honey, I’m so sorry you feel that way.”

I didn’t want to fold into her right then, I felt too angry, but
anger sits right there next to grief, so, so close that you lean just so slightly and you’re there, in this other place that feels like another country, but is the same country, with different customs and a different language but with the same shared ground. I started to cry. Your own sense of being shut out was huge and powerful. It meant it was just you, by yourself, in this big space of loss, with its depth and endlessness and lack of boundaries. You stand in front of a deep, dark sky and feel your own smallness, and you stand in front of loss or the possibility of it and feel even smaller than that. Loss is what you’d do anything to avoid.

“Oh, if you had any idea how much I love you and treasure you. You.” She kissed the side of my head. I could feel her chest heave against mine and mine against hers. “If you don’t already know that—I blame myself.”

“Just, Juliet … You two are always …” I crossed my fingers where they lay on her shoulder.

She broke away from me, took my shoulders. “Oh honey. I got this so wrong. Since …” She put her hands up to her eyes. “Since …” It was funny—I didn’t know what she was going to say before she said it. That’s how far I kept it from my own self. “Since your
father
left …” The word
father
sounded funny coming from her. “Juliet had a hard time. More than you—you were younger. You were
resilient
. She remembered. There’s this thing Juliet has, about going and staying. Keeping people away, she keeps people away, maybe even me, the way you keep people close. You keep people close by looking after them. It’s what I do too. I hold tight. Even what I’ve done with Juliet. See. Scarlet? You and I have always been the similar ones. You and I are.”